The Snow Garden

by Christopher Rice

  “Sorry. I just don’t know how many people he wants reading it.”

  “So he’s a writer now? In addition to being the prince of Park Avenue?” Kathryn met the sound of her disapproval with an icy stare. April softened. “Can you tell me what it’s about?” She could sense Kathryn’s protectiveness of Randall’s short story.

  Kathryn managed a slight laugh. The story was so peculiar it defied easy description. “It’s about this kid who grows up in this small town in Texas — ”

  “And Randall’s from New York.”

  “That’s why it’s a story. Should I finish?”

  April rolled her eyes as if she couldn’t care less.

  “When he’s a little kid, his mom gets killed in this car accident. Her car stalls out at this railroad crossing and she gets hit and dies instantly. Then the county finally decides to put up gates and warning lights because she’s like the ninth person to get killed in that spot. So then . . .” April was holding up a collared shirt that looked like it was made out of aluminum to her chest and examining herself in the full-length mirror. “April, are you listening?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “All right, so when the boy turns fifteen he finds out that this entire town he grew up in exists only because the county put up the gates and people finally thought it was safe to live near the tracks. Basically, his mother had to get killed before anyone would build his hometown. So the kid just... snaps. And one night, he derails the train.”

  Startled, April turned. “How?” she asked, her sense of logic offended.

  “He saws through some of the railroad ties.”

  April’s eyebrows arched. “If it was that easy to derail a train, wouldn’t more fifteen-year-olds be doing it?”

  “It’s a story, April. And I don’t think you’re supposed to believe the boy really means to do it.”

  But even Kathryn wasn’t sure. The descriptions of propane tanks lying in the smoldering cavities of tract homes and overturned trailers had been too emphatic, demonstrating a love of fire even as it consumed humans, and more than that a kind of rage she had never seen Randall exhibit in daily life. Or had she just missed it? Was there something darker lurking behind his warm-but-knowing smiles and his dreamy silences? In the retelling, the five-page story now had a dizzying effect, and she slid open her desk drawer and deposited it inside. When she turned, April was studying her, as if she understood the strange spell the story had cast over her.

  “What’s a Warhol party, anyway?” Kathryn asked.

  “I don’t know.” April brightened at Kathryn’s first sign of surrender. “Drugs?”

  Kathryn winced. “One condition.”

  “Here we go!”

  “If Jesse Lowry shows up, then I’m out of there.”

  April lifted both hands in a gesture of defeat. “Fine.”

  Dr. Eric Eberman wasn’t sure what had awakened him, the mournful wail of the siren carried by the wind buffeting the walls of the house, or the feel of Randall Stone’s teeth gently closing around one of his nipples. The bedroom window was rattling in its frame, and outside, the tree branches jerked in the streetlight's wan halo, their shadows latticing Randall’s face, hiding and then revealing his pale blue eyes and slight, electric smile.

  “I have to go,” Randall whispered.

  He bent down as if to give Eric a formal kiss on the cheek, and in response Eric curved an arm around his shoulders and brought the young man’s body on top of his. Randall let out a gentle, almost placating laugh before his head came to rest on Eric’s chest. As if he had needed only Eric’s reticence to release him to reignite their passion, Randall slid one bent knee up between Eric’s thighs, applying gentle pressure with his kneecap to Eric’s crotch while his tongue traced a path up Eric’s sternum, and then up one side of his neck before he withdrew, face level with Eric’s. Eric allowed his lids to roll shut, giving Randall silent permission to lean in for a genuine good-bye kiss.

  As their mouths met, Eric allowed his eyes to wander down Randall’s naked back, fingers traveling leisurely over taut muscle beneath boyishly smooth skin, wondering how long before the first stab of guilt would come, that sudden weight that yanked him down from the delirious high of touching what had previously been prohibited to him.

  Randall withdrew, lips lingering slightly, before he cupped Eric’s face in his hands, gazing down at him with a sudden, penetrating stare. Randall’s full lips and baby fat-padded cheeks could transform from a pout to a smile in a second, but a rigid jawline added years to his face when it tensed in anger, as Eric had seen whenever he came close to denying Randall what he wanted. Which, to Eric's silent delight, was usually himself.

  As Randall rested his head against his chest, Eric’s fingers touched the first puckered scar on the back of Randall’s thigh, and he felt the young man tense, and then think twice, before letting himself go lax.

  “Do they hurt?”

  “Never,” Randall answered.

  “They must’ve at the time.”

  Randall grunted slightly as if to say he couldn’t remember.

  “Remind me how...”

  “My mother was preparing for this big dinner party. I was three and she put me up on the counter so I could watch her cook. Or not get out of her sight. I barely remember. . .Randall paused, as if trying to summon the recollection. “I just remember this entire pan going up in flames. It was like this big curtain of fire. I fell and just started running. My mom caught me and put me out before I set the whole apartment on fire.”

  The first time Eric had asked about the burns covering Randall’s legs, his description had been more vivid. The pan had tipped. His mother had screamed when she knocked it over. Three-year-old Randall had fainted the moment he saw his legs on fire.

  “I thought you blacked out the second it happened.”

  Randall lifted himself off Eric’s chest.

  “I must have.” He kissed Eric’s forehead firmly. “Because I don’t remember any pain. Maybe when you’re that young the mind protects you from pain more than it does later in life.”

  Outside, the first siren was joined by a second.

  Randall slid out from Eric’s arms and swung his legs to the floor. He reached for his pack of Dunhill Lights on the nightstand and extended one to Eric. Eric didn’t need to shake his head. Randall knew he wouldn’t smoke. They shared their silent joke—that the man who had just cheated on his wife with one of his male students wouldn’t be caught dead with a cigarette in his mouth. Randall lit it and crossed to the bedroom window. Eric saw the snow for the first time, framing Randall as he stood naked in front of the glass, one arm braced against the panes over his head, where a curl of smoke crept from his fingers through the streetlight’s frail glow.

  It was ironic, Eric thought, the way Randall’s sudden departure from the bed constricted his breath, while the young man’s pressure on top of him seemed to push blood and oxygen at a vital clip through his veins. Only several feet away, Randall seemed strangely and quickly withdrawn.

  “Where are you going?” Eric asked, suddenly aware that the idea of Randall leaving him alone again twisted something tight in his stomach.

  “A party.”

  “So I was just a pit stop?”

  Randall turned from the window. “Are you asking me to spend the night?”

  “She’s not coming back.”

  “I know.” Randall returned his attention to the flakes falling with determined force past the window.

  “Sometimes I think she might never come back,” Eric added, unnerved by Randall’s silence.

  “That would be easy, wouldn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it would be easier than leaving her.”

  A bolt of silence struck. Eric fought the urge to ask Randall if that was what he truly wanted—for Eric to leave his wife of almost twenty years. But that question brought on a cascade of others and Randall wouldn’t be able to tolerate the answers, despite his adult composu
re. The result would be the destruction of the private world they had created in this darkened bedroom, a world that allowed Eric to satisfy a thirst that had gone unquenched for two decades.

  “You made the rule yourself, Eric. Can’t spend the night, remember?”

  “We have rules?”

  Randall’s amused exhalation of breath couldn’t qualify as a laugh. “Rules are good,” he said. “Rules make me think that this is more real than what it is.’’

  “What do you mean?” Eric asked.

  “Something that both of us are too afraid to give a name. A bunch of stolen moments lined up in a row. When this ends, whatever this is, both of us will spend the rest of our lives trying to figure out the kindest way to call it a mistake. It’s not fair to me, when you think about it.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Because I’ll live longer than you.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  Randall turned from the window. He seemed startled, and Eric realized that in his attempt to keep his tone neutral he had put the dark undertone of a threat in his words. “Because you’re younger, you mean? That’s why you’ll live longer.”

  “I guess,” Randall said, sounding distracted.

  His shadow moved to the chair draped with his clothes. By the time he heard the rattle of Randall’s belt buckle sliding to his waist, Eric was speaking again. “Randall.” He could see Randall’s head turn. “I’m asking you to stay.”

  Randall paused, then moved to the foot of the bed and crawled across it on all fours until his mouth was inches from Eric’s. Randall was still shirtless, his jeans unbuttoned. His typically gelled and spiked hair was slightly mussed and matted from being twisted against the pillow. He stared at Eric, eyes bright, teeth sinking slowly into his lower lip, and Eric felt his stomach tighten in anticipation. Randall’s mischievous grin drew out Eric’s original, burning attraction to the pretematurally assured young man. A no-longer-buried desire to have him, shape him, and conquer him; a desire that to his consternation had not gone away after simply taking the boy to bed.

  “No,” Randall said. “I like you better when you don’t get everything you want.”

  Randall’s kiss was brief but firm. His weight left the mattress, and Eric slouched back onto the pillows, rolling over onto one side and listening to the mournful sirens that no longer seemed to be approaching or departing, but had joined together in a consistent, off-key wail, its direction distorted by the wind.

  “Want to cut through the Elms?”

  “Shut up, April.”

  “They’re a good shortcut if you’re not loaded. Or you don't have an overactive imagination.”

  The snow was driving now, cutting into their bare faces, and they were forced to walk with their shoulders hunched. April had brought her jacket up over her neck. Kathryn could hear sirens coming from the city below the hill. Kathryn shot a glance leftward at the expanse of suggestive shadows. To bypass it, they had to walk through residential streets.

  “I don't get it,” Kathryn said.

  “How much money did they spend to build the Tech Center?”

  “Loads probably.”

  “And they still haven’t managed to build on the Elms?”

  Up ahead, the four houses fringing Fraternity Green were fishbowls of light. Strobe lights from inside Burton House cut stained-glass shapes across the snowy lawn. “You think they should put a dorm there just because it gives you the creeps?” April asked.

  “No. It’s just weird that Michael Price can’t get his hands on a piece of prime real estate.”

  “Please. Be grateful. If someone doesn’t stop that jerk, he’s going to coat the entire campus in chrome!”

  Michael Price was one of Atherton’s most prominent alumni, featured, it seemed, in every issue of the alumni magazine as well as spreads in everything from Architectural Digest to The New York Times. Kathryn had studied a photo of him in Paper during a Psychology Intro lecture. Swollen and strong boned, he exhibited a brutal, sexualized assurance that repelled her. Captured in freeze frame, he seemed like the kind of man who swaggered, who believed that little was out of his reach. It was that rare quality that might have led him to import cold and sterile modern architecture to his alma mater. From the blinding, plate-glass Technology Center to the massive refurbishment of the fifteen-story Sciences Library, students and faculty alike found Price’s additions glaringly inappropriate for a predominantly Gothic campus.

  “You know the Pamela Milford story, right?” April asked. Kathryn shook her head. They were steps from Burton House and the bass pounding of disco was already throbbing in their gums. “I think it was the eighties. She wandered out of some party here, drunk off her ass, stumbled into the Elms, and drowned.”

  “How did she drown?”

  “There’s some kind of creek, I think.”

  “All the more reason to raze it.”

  Kathryn shivered. On the front porch of the house, she looked back to the green. “He might be inside. Can we just go in?”

  April tugged on her shoulder.

  Inside, they were instantly swallowed by the shoulder-to-shoulder throng clogging the front hallway. The frat’s living room had been transformed into a poor man’s Studio 54. Half the dancers were wearing neon-colored wigs and a Warhol film was being projected onto the ceiling, shaggy-headed sylphs staggering and jerking across the frame. Kathryn scanned the crowd for Randall.

  A rail-thin boy done up in drag shoved a tray of Jell-O shots in their faces. April took one, shot it, and then handed one to Kathryn. “I told you they didn’t card!”

  “What’s in this?” Kathryn asked the drag queen.

  “X,” he shouted back, before vanishing onto the adjacent dance floor.

  April brought one hand to her mouth. “Oh God!”

  “He was probably kidding,” Kathryn said, as she placed her shot on the stair above her head.

  “Whatever. If I’m still awake in four hours, cuddling up against you in bed and stroking your hair, then these freaks are going in front of the Disciplinary Council!”

  Kathryn hooked her by the arm. “Let’s find Randall!”

  The kitchen was as crowded as the rest of the house. What counter space was not covered in empty beer cases and liquor bottles was blocked by drunken couples holding on to each for support as they were rocked onto the balls of their feet by a steady procession toward the open back door. A hand slapped Kathryn’s ass. When she turned, she saw April several steps behind her, and whirled to face her offender. Tim Mathis grinned back at her. His dimpled cheeks had the blush of too many drinks. A stranger might have thought the short, stocky, peroxide blond with the bicycle chain around his neck was making an ill-advised pass. Kathryn knew better. Tim threw both arms skyward with a squeal before enfolding Kathryn in a sloppy embrace.

  “Have you seen Randall?” Kathryn asked as she pried herself free.

  “Nope. No sign of the Ice Queen. But his roommate is certainly here, though!” Tim said, exaggerating the words with a sexual suggestiveness that turned Kathryn’s stomach. “He's out on the dance floor bumping and grinding with some twelve-year-old girl.”

  “Who?” Kathryn asked, before she could stop herself.

  “Someone who doesn’t know any better" April cut in, grabbing at Kathryn’s shoulders.

  “What’s the guy’s deal, anyway?” Tim squinted at her. “Randall wouldn’t give me any of the dirt. Is he a member of the spur posse or something?” Kathryn was being pressed up against Tim’s spandexed chest. April’s hand gripped her shoulder, ready to pull Kathryn away from a conversation she knew Kathryn wanted to avoid. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. Jesse Lowry is a Bruce Weber photo waiting to be snapped, but forgive me for thinking that a man who sleeps with that many women doesn’t have something to prove!”

  “Have you quit smoking yet?” April asked in her ear.

  “No.”

  “Let’s go have one. I can’t breathe in here.”

  “No,
I wasn’t talking. Really,” Tim cut in. “And aren't you a med student?”

  “Nice try,” April replied. “Biomedical ethics. And aren’t you a music major?”

  “No!”

  “Then why don't you try talking without sing-ing”

  “You’re just pissed at everyone because you’re a dyke.”

  “I’m also black. Which fills me with rage. Kathryn, cigarette!”

  “No, no. Not so fast!” Tim grabbed Kathryn’s other shoulder. “Seriously, Kathryn, I know how you and Randall are. You two probably did the: whole finger-pricking, blood-sharing thing. He picks out your clothes, you set him up on dates with all your non-threatening male friends. It’s a strong bond, I know. And I hate to be the first one to tell you, but I think there might be more going down behind that door than you ever—”

  “No offense to you or your kind, Tim, but Jesse Lowry is as heterosexual as they come,” April cut in.

  “Bullshit. He’s sexual. When are you girls ever going to learn the difference?”

  “Maybe you can interview Jesse for your column,” Kathryn managed. “A man, his penis, and the doormats he rubs it on.”

  “I’m sure he does more than rub.”

  “All right,” April growled behind her, patience gone.

  “But screw that,” Tim continued, unfazed. “I’m about to quit anyway. They think if they make me a news editor then I’ll stop trying to rile things up. I mean, do you guys even read the Atherton Herald? It’s, like, three pages long and the major headline is always something real scintillating like ‘Sophomore Plants Tree.’ ”

  Kathryn laughed.

  “I am claustrophobic!” April barked.

  “Jesus, April. All right. Tim, if you see Randall, tell him I’m looking for him.”

  “Yeah, right. Like I ever see Randall anymore,” Tim muttered, raising his plastic cup in a sarcastic toast.

  On the patio, smokers shivered in huddles. Trash cans lined the clapboard fence, spilling flattened beer cases. “That was rude,” Kathryn finally said.